A push-type reel lawnmower cuts a swath through a patch of fake grass. The nearuniversal
contemporary conflict between the real and the virtual, between presentation
and representation, between the thing itself and its mediation, is exemplified through the
use of an actual physical object, a working tool; and a no-less physical replica in plastic
and other hydrocarbon derivatives, of a patch of de-natured second nature. This
increasing dichotomy within human perception has its damaging societal and cultural
effects, as normative separation from the real through the stand-in of simulacrum has
the propensity to establish ersatz and unexamined equivalences between types of
experience, rendering fine distinctions less particular and even inconsequential.

Failure to acknowledge the acute differences between an objective thing and its mimetic
surrogate can result in a lack of meaningful separation, such that real differences
between the two begin to lose critical traction. Eventually the tension that historically
has existed within acts of discernible discrimination becomes undermined in an
uncritical relativism, collapsing into arbitrary signification; progressive thought itself
becomes compromised and diminished.